'Fully Charged' life: Tom Rath shares advice from latest research

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Author Tom Rath's research has found that keys to a more fulfilling life include helping others; creating positive social interactions; and following a healthy lifestyle that includes getting enough sleep and eating a nutritious diet.

Author Tom Rath's research has found that keys to a more fulfilling life include helping others; creating positive social interactions; and following a healthy lifestyle that includes getting enough sleep and eating a nutritious diet. (PeopleImages.com, Getty Images)

Are you fully charged? @TomCRath has tips on energizing your work and life.

Studying human behavior is a passion for author Tom Rath. "I've been doing this work for the last 10 to 15 years, and I still get surprised and inspired by the research," said Rath, who has sold more than 6 million books, including best sellers "How Full Is Your Bucket?" (Gallup Press) and "Eat Move Sleep" (Missionday).

His new book, "Are You Fully Charged? The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life" (Silicon Guild), draws on the latest research from business and psychology to discover the keys to loving life and being engaged at work. Included in the book are discussion questions for each chapter as well as recommended reading suggestions.

And the three keys? "To be fully charged, you have to start by doing something for others," Rath said. "Then you need to have positive interactions, and you must live a healthy lifestyle. So it's meaning, interactions and energy that will get you there. But you need to have all three."

Following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Q: You say in the book that money really doesn't buy happiness. Can you explain?

A: Now that it's so much easier to survey people and ping them on their smartphone ... as a result of all this expansion of information and connectedness we now know a lot about what creates true well-being in the moment. The highest amount of positive experiences come where you're having a real good day, making a difference to other people, and feel rested and fully charged. You (don't) have to be rich to be full of rich experiences.

Recent research (from) Gallup (asked) people in countries all over the world about their highest positive experience. Four of the top five countries with the best daily experience and daily well-being in the entire world are in the bottom half in the world in terms of wealth per capita. Paraguay and a lot of Latin American countries are at the top of the list, instead of the superwealthy countries in Western Europe.

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Tom Rath, author of "Are You Fully Charged? The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life”

Tom Rath, author of "Are You Fully Charged? The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life” (Picasa)

Thinking of what you can do to help somebody tomorrow can create more well-being than thinking of all you have to do in a decade or a lifetime. We have to pay more attention to the actions we take every day, and those simple moments will shape your years, and overall life.

Q: You write that a lack of sleep costs our economy $63 billion in productivity.

A: Sleep is a priority — not an expense to cut so you can be on email at one in the morning. It's been refreshing for me to see some business leaders and leaders in the military talking about how you can't have people working in these important jobs who have no sleep. That's an equivalent of having a six pack of beer in their system. So when you start to compare sleeplessness with intoxication of alcohol, it becomes a lot easier to help people make those decisions about prioritizing sleep.

Q: What can people do to be more productive in their jobs?

A: In our research, the top performers do two things differently. One is they sleep longer than most Americans — they sleep eight-and-a-half hours. And the other thing they do is work in bursts with rests in between. When people sit at their desk for hours, the most productive people would work for 52 minutes and then take 17-minute breaks. We need these cycles of intense focus, with a refreshing and renewal in order to do our best work on a daily basis. And this benefits not just their physical health but their creativity and mental health as well.

Q: You say to deal with stress, one should think of it as a challenge instead of as a stressor. How do we start?

A: We may not have any control over whether a person brings us a really negative charge, but we do get to choose our response every time. I lost my left eye to cancer when I was younger ... and as a product of that I can't see well on my left side. I bump into people all the time because I can't see them. I'm not walking around trying to bump into people, but sometimes people think I'm being rude. If you could just pause for three seconds and ask yourself how your response is going to affect your day and another person, it makes it a lot easier to see this as a challenge.

If someone really gets frustrated and angry at something so small as (someone bumping into them), I think they must be having a really rough day and the last thing they need is for me to compound that. Those interactions do cascade. So we can think of these inconveniences as a stressor, or we can challenge ourselves to not take someone bumping into you personally. We face a challenge with more optimism than we do when we face a stressor.

Q: What can we do right now to improve our well-being?

A: The single most important thing you can do is to focus on a small act that picks up the spirits of another person. That's actually more helpful than if you're trying to help yourself in that moment. The more we do in those little interactions that are as pure as possible to try to help another person maybe could turn the course of their day. Like smiling at someone, or giving very specific feedback. ... When you're talking to someone about something they did well, "Great job on the project you did last week," what would help a lot more would be if you said, "You did great work on section five of this proposal." It creates so much collective good.

Q: Can being forced to smile during a stressful activity really make you more productive?

A: Yes, and that was surprising to me. (In one study) researchers trained participants to hold chopsticks in their mouths in a way that forced a smile, and had them perform multitasking activities designed to be stressful. The group that was smiling through the tasks — even if it was forced — responded better to the stressors. They had lower heart rates and lower stress levels.

Q: After all you've learned, what do you now do every day at home with your wife and two kids?

A: Brian Wansink, who wrote the book "Mindless Eating," talks about how if people go around the dinner table and they each say one good thing that happened that day, research shows they actually eat healthier meals on average. And that's something that we've been doing as a family for years. And it sets the tone of the conversation in a really nice way. It lets everyone share what's been going on in their day and I guess it helps us eat healthier food, too, so that helps to boot!